Today the cabinet is meeting to consider whether to create a new ‘super-department’ along the lines of the British Home Office or the US Department of Homeland Security. The new portfolio would merge the Immigration department – already boasting its own paramilitary in the form of the Australian Border Force – with the Australian Federal Police and spy agency ASIO. And Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is the man who will oversee the new department.

On the face of things, this needn’t be fatal to the ABC’s mission as a public sphere broadcaster. The ABC is infamous for its internecine warfare, and its website is a bewildering maze. The national broadcaster can and should do better on certain basic aspects of accessibility and audience engagement. But it is also true that, in terms of its place and importance in the Australian public sphere, the ABC is in rude health.

In June 2016, an Australian on minimum wage earned $656.90 per week. That is $34,159 a year, before tax. According to the Australian Tax Office’s ‘simple tax calculator’, the tax owed would be $3030, leaving a take-home salary of $31,128. Let’s call it $600 a week. It’s fair to say that many of us would struggle to make ends meet on that income – $600 a week does not go very far in modern Australia.

Why would the MPACs need more funding? After all, they are already among the best-funded cultural organisations in the country. Opera Australia is the single largest recipient of Australia Council funding, receiving $20.5 million in 2014, plus another $4.2 million from the New South and Victorian governments. All up, Opera Australia receives more government funding than the 145 small-to-medium organisations put together. But such an imbalance is par for the course in performing arts funding.

Fifield still sits with Brandis in the Senate, and in the cabinet (Brandis remains Attorney-General). Brandis is well-known for his long memory and equally long list of enemies. Killing off the Excellence Program altogether may well have started a factional civil war. So Fifield compromised. He gave $32 million over four years back to the Australia Council, under the pretence that this would protect the smaller arts companies.

‘I think it would also be fair to say that we should have made more of a fuss at the time.’ It was April 2015. In a brightly lit Australian National University lecture theatre, Seven West Media’s Bridget Fair was lamenting the passage of a terrorism law. Depending on how you count such things, it was either the sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth anti-terror law passed by Australia’s parliament since 2001. This one had far-reaching implications. Among other things, it criminalised the conduct of journalism.

As a lawyer who’s worked for a number of years at the Copyright Agency, I am genuinely in favour of copyright and believe that writers and others who create works are served well by it.

Last year I had a meeting with two officers of the Australia Council. The Australia Council – or OzCo, as nearly everyone in the cultural industries calls it – is the federal government’s arts funding and advisory body. The meeting was with two of the council’s digital and new media team, who were keen to explain the latest digital arts initiative, Arts Content for a Digital Era.